Businesses, government entities, groups of people, and other types of organizations are capable of generating massive amounts of content on a daily basis. Furthermore, this content can easily be copied, modified, shared, and republished in different contents nearly as quickly. For example, documents may be edited, slides of a presentation deck may be re-arranged, a slide from one presentation deck may be re-used in other presentation decks, and so on. When one portion of content (e.g., a slide or page) is copied from one content item (e.g., a presentation deck or word processing document) to another, it is not considered the same portion of content by document management systems. Furthermore, when these content elements are edited, other aspects of the content element may remain unchanged and, therefore, the pre- and post-edited elements may remain semantically and/or visually similar. However, document management systems track usage and other statistics related to the two copies separately even though they contain the same information. Keeping separate metrics for these two portions of content dilutes the quality of metrics, which can be made even worse each time the content is copied or a new version is created.